Asian Families Travel a Long Way for Summer Camp

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Clockwise from top left: Chiang Chieh-Yin, 12, in cap, and Hsieh Chan-Jung, 11, at iD Tech camp; Futaba Kawakami, 8, center, at TADA Youth Theater camp; Chiang Chieh-Yin and his mother, Hsu Huai-Ling, in their hotel; Cao Zilin, 5, in goggles, at the pool.CreditTop left and bottom right: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times; top right and bottom left: Andrew Renneisen/The New York Times

By Kyle Spencer

July 11, 2014

After hours spent performing cartwheels, American show tunes and a series of jazzy dance routines in a cramped studio on West 28th Street in Manhattan, 8-year-old Futaba Kawakami left TADA Youth Theater camp earlier this week, clammy and slightly hoarse. She pulled off her new camp T-shirt, the one with the slogan Sing! Dance! Act! emblazoned on the back, and marshaled enough energy to ask her mother for ice cream. Then they headed off to 16 Handles in Chelsea.

It seemed like a pretty typical summer day for a pretty typical New York City kid, except that when it was time to go home, Futaba and her mother, Keiko, did not ride the subway to Queens, or the bus to the Upper West Side. Instead, they piled into a cab that whizzed them past Macy’s, Times Square and a gaggle of 57th Street souvenir shops to a short-term, luxury rental apartment behind the Plaza hotel.

That’s where the Kawakamis, who are Japanese and live in Tokyo, are staying for the rest of the month so that Futaba can experience what many city youngsters take for granted: day camp.

With her summer sojourn, the fourth grader, whose father is a wealthy Tokyo investor, is doing her part to fuel a growing trend at the city’s day camps. Camp directors in and around the five boroughs say the children of well-off families from Beijing, Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo now annually descend upon the city’s acting studios, sports centers, science labs and swimming pools to join their American peers in what has become, for those who can afford it, an international rite of passage. And while the overall numbers may be small, they form a significant part of the camps’ clientele.

Ten years ago, Cari Kosins, the camp director at the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School, also referred to as L.R.E.I., rarely got so much as an email from abroad. This year, nine campers and their families have flown in from Asia, coming from places including Bali, China, Japan and Singapore. Many of the families, Ms. Kosins said, rent lofts near the Greenwich Village camp while their children take part in spy school, jewelry-making workshops, rock band sessions, soccer tutorials and games of gaga in and around the school’s campuses. When they depart, they add their voices to what, even abroad, is a word-of-mouth business.

“Families come and then they fly home, and tell their friends back home,” she said. “It’s not unusual for us to get several families from the same city or school.”

At iD Tech, a national technology camp with branches in cities across the country, 41 of its 2,901 campers in the New York City area this summer are from Asia. Of the 154 students enrolled in A Class Act NY’s musical theater camps this summer, artistic director Jessica Rofe said, two are flying in with their parents from Japan, two are coming from South Korea and one is arriving from China, for a week of vocal training, stage combat lessons and the chance to make their debuts on an Off Broadway stage at the end of the session.

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Hsieh Chan-Jung, in green shirt, and Chiang Chieh-Yin work with an instructor, Zak Schiller, in a video game-design class at iD Tech.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

Day camp directors outside the city are seeing a similar upswing. This summer at Camp Ramaquois, in Rockland County, where many children from Manhattan go to camp, six campers are from Asia. One of them, a 7-year-old from Tokyo, is picked up by the camp’s yellow bus outside his Upper East Side hotel every morning. The camp’s director, Arthur Kessler, said he had 10 Asian campers last year and had already been contacted about spots for next summer.

New York’s wealthiest families don’t usually send their children to day camp in the city, preferring instead to pack them off to summer-long sleep-away camps in Maine or the Adirondacks, or vacation with them in the Hamptons or on Nantucket. More often, city camps cater to youngsters with two working parents, neither of whom can afford to take the summer off and need a way to keep their children occupied. Well-to-do families from overseas, however, see day camp in New York not as a middle-class phenomenon, but as a coveted opportunity — one that doesn’t really exist in their home countries.

“Many families from Asia have begun to see day camp in New York City as a luxury brand,” said Jill Tipograph, the director of Everything Summer, a camp advisory firm that places about 100 children a year, including some from overseas, in a variety of summer programs. “They are very discerning, but they do not have the breadth and depth of options back home.”

Futaba, for one, said that attending day camp in New York is a must-do for children from her set.

“It’s kind of the really cool thing,” she said in near-perfect English while chatting this month after a day at her first stop of the summer: gymnastics camp at Chelsea Piers, where she practiced her balance beam moves, vaulting and tumbling. “I have a lot of friends who do camp,” she said. “That’s how we know what camps to go to.”

Her mother, sitting nearby, wearing Prada sunglasses and a pair of black silk shorts, concurred, ticking off the names of camps in and around New York that had been recommended to her by friends, some of whom were also in the city this month with their traveling campers.

Futaba will soon return to Chelsea Piers for ice skating camp. She is also scheduled to attend A Class Act NY. Her older sister, Minori, 12, is currently attending a five-week academic camp at Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school in Wallingford, Conn.

“We do not have these kinds of opportunities in Japan,” Ms. Kawakami said. “We have music and dance camps. We don’t have variety.”

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Cao Zilin, who also goes by Tony.CreditAndrew Renneisen/The New York Times

Having international campers among their ranks presents camp directors and counselors with new challenges. Futaba’s facility with English aside, many of the children may have limited language skills and need extra one-on-one attention to help them feel like part of the group.

“We really try to make sure there is no separation and that the campers get to build up their confidence while they are here,” said Kas Graves, a musical director for TADA.

Placing her hands on the piano’s keys, she told the campers, “We’re going to do it,” shortly before they broke into a song and dance routine from “Shrek.” “We’re going to put it away.”

Camp directors said they also tried to steer families toward appropriate classes. A Class Act NY encourages parents from abroad to sign their children up for its musical theater weeks and to avoid Thespian Theater camp, which focuses on script analysis and character development, and requires more sophisticated English skills. And at both Little Red School House and Curious Jane, a girls’ camp held at various locations, directors encourage the parents of limited-English speakers to sign their children up for art and sports-related programs, rather than placing them in more academic settings where higher-level reading and writing skills are required.

Some camps with more advanced offerings, like Robofun on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, occasionally accommodate groups from Asia, which often bring their own translators to help the children along.

Last summer, Grace Leng, an education consultant based in New York, accompanied one of those groups — 15 students, ages 7 to 12 — who came to the United States from China for seven days. The children of technology executives, hoteliers and manufacturing magnates, they stayed at a hotel in Flushing, Queens, and spent their mornings at Robofun designing electronic cars and robotic monsters, and their afternoons visiting sights like the Statue of Liberty and the American Museum of Natural History. They spent their final days at Disney World in Florida.

Other Asian children, like the half-dozen or so teenagers from China and Japan who last year attended CampusNYC, a two-week culinary camp in TriBeCa, come without adult chaperones. Staying in a dormitory on the Upper East Side, they filled their days making blanquette de veau, Philly cheesesteaks and flourless ginger-chocolate cake and their weekends with city food tours.

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Futaba Kawakami listens to an instructor at the TADA Youth Theater camp.CreditAndrew Renneisen/The New York Times

Most campers come with at least one parent, usually their mothers, and stay in luxury rentals. The apartment Futaba and her mother have rented has a kitchen with granite countertops and a living room that is spacious by Manhattan standards.

Chiang Chen, 9, whose mother, Lin Mei-Chun, brought her to the city so she could take classes in graphic novels and do-it-yourself room design at Curious Jane, at the Marymount School on the Upper East Side, is living in a loft in SoHo. Chiang Chieh-Yin, 12, and his friend Hsieh Chan-Jung, 11, stayed with their mothers in the Marlton, the boutique hotel near iD Tech’s New York University location. The boys, who studied video game design, went by the names Jay and Junior, for the duration of camp.

Hoteliers and agents who handle long-term luxury rentals said they were trying to serve this growing clientele by offering the kind of housing that extended-stay travelers from Asia want. One such agency, Oakwood Worldwide, which leases hundreds of furnished apartments in and around the city, has recently formed a partnership with the Mapletree Group, an international real estate agency based in Singapore, with an eye toward offering more family-friendly New York City apartments. The emphasis is on units with separate bedrooms, washers and dryers and well-equipped kitchens.

The rents on these apartments run into the thousands of dollars a month. Add airfare, camp tuition, spending money and the cost of supplies, and many families can end up spending more than $15,000 per child, according to Evelyn Sinae Jang, an education consultant from Seoul. Graphic novel camp for 10-year-olds at Curious Jane, for example, costs $585 a week. A two-week iD Tech programming camp can cost close to $3,000 depending on the class and the age of the student.

But Ms. Jang — who advises a dozen parents a year on school and summer planning, and places students at camps across the United States — said wealthy parents from Asian countries were generally unfazed by such sums.

“They really need to know the purpose of each visit,” she said of her clients. “They want to know what kind of outcome they can expect. But they will absolutely not have a fixed budget.”

Because these youngsters are rich, even by New York standards, and their after-camp stamping grounds are particularly luxurious, it’s easy to make comparisons to Eloise ordering room service at the Plaza or to Richie Rich, the comic book character who owns two of everything.

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Hsieh Chan-Jung at his hotel.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

Since arriving at the end of June, Futaba has seen three Broadway musicals; spent the night at the natural history museum; learned how to make gourmet chocolate; eaten at Sushi Yasuda, the acclaimed 43rd Street restaurant (where she bumped into Martha Stewart); spent hours meandering around the Plaza’s food court; and gone shopping for American Girl doll paraphernalia.

During a visit to her apartment, she showed off a new pair of ice skates, which she will use for her Chelsea Piers ice-skating camp. She and her mother bought them at Westside Skate & Stick in the West 20s, spending more than $300 on the skates and other gear.

Before her camp started, Chiang Chen, the Curious Jane camper, who also goes by Alicia, spent one afternoon barbecuing in Greenwich, Conn., where friends of her parents have a 15-bathroom home with a heated pool. She also tested out the Jacuzzi.

Douglas Murphy, who runs CampusNYC, the boutique culinary camp, said last year’s international campers came armed with their parents’ credit cards, and used them to spend hundreds of dollars on jewelry. One teenager from South Korea spent $800 at a MAC makeup store, Mr. Murphy said. Another bought a few hundred dollars’ worth of chocolate at Jacques Torres in Dumbo, Brooklyn, to send to friends at American sleep-away camps outside the city.

Despite this air of privilege, most parents said they were sending their children to New York camp for something money can’t buy: ease with American culture.

One recent afternoon, at Pierce Country Day Camp, in Roslyn, N.Y., a camp popular with families from Brooklyn and Manhattan, 5-year-old Cao Zilin, who is living with his parents in a rented house nearby for the summer, immersed himself in the traditions of summer. Tony, as he was being called at camp, dived for rings in one of the camp’s seven pools, played basketball, decorated pancakes and followed along with the camp’s theme song. (He enjoyed listening to the pleasant-sounding song, he said through a translator, but had limited interest in singing it himself.) He also made himself a necklace with his name on it during arts and crafts.

His mother, Zou Lifen, said the family was here so her son could learn English, and familiarize himself with American ways. The hope is that he will attend high school and university here.

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Futaba with her mother, Keiko.CreditAndrew Renneisen/The New York Times

During the first days of camp, after he had disembarked from the bus and was back at the rented house, Tony asked his mother what “follow me,” a phrase often repeated at camp, meant. He also wanted to know how to say “cookie,” because they were in full abundance at the camp, he told her.

Futaba’s mother said she, too, brought her daughter to New York City for camp to help her improve her English. Ms. Kawakami said she also wanted Futaba to be able to express herself more fully.

“At home, she can be in her shell,” Ms. Kawakami said. “But she comes out of it when she is in New York. I want her to be confident like that all the time and be able to adapt to new environments.”

And Jay’s parents said they chose iD Tech camp for him because there simply weren’t camps like it in Taipei. Reached by Skype, his father, Chiang Daw-Min, said he hoped the experience would help Jay later in life, when he applies for admission to a prestigious boarding school or perhaps college in the United States. Mr. Chiang said he wanted his son to develop creative-thinking skills.

Speaking in their small but lavishly decorated hotel room after camp one day, Jay’s mother, Hsu Huai-Ling, agreed. Still, she said she recognized that at American camp, academics — even those infused with creative flair — were not campers’ main concern.

Indeed, her son told her, in between video game-designing stints, he and his peers took breaks. They played capture the flag on a grassy knoll near campus, and Jay talked about ice hockey with Colin, an 11-year-old from Staten Island who sat next to him for the week. Jay also gorged on something that, despite healthy food trends, remains a camp staple: American junk food.

During lunch, Jay said he had devoured several cheeseburgers, a heaping plate of French fries, hot dogs and lots of desserts. “Everything that is not healthy,” he told his mother, smiling mischievously.

Was she all right with that?

“It’s O.K. for now,” she said, her son translating while lying on a double bed overflowing with shopping bags as the pair began to get ready to head out for dinner. “Until we go home.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an article last Sunday about families from Asia who travel to New York City for summer camp referred incorrectly, in some editions, to Bali. It is a province of Indonesia, not a country.